Saddening IDEA and JB-in-general feedback

Hey folks. I like a bit less-than-formal style of writing, so this is the way it will go.

This is a disappointment post. Look, this is a sad face: 😔. And these are fellow developers just like me: 😔😔😔. I mean, there are more than three, but i have no intention to stress test your database. And this is what we observe over the past years: 

📉
🕛📉
🕑🕓📉 ← no, this has nothing to do with our investments, it's the quality. Of our own products as well, of course, but the post is about something else.

I have no idea (pun was not intended - until i've spotted it) how to write this so it wouldn't look like an angery iliterel tweet from a customer, a one just having a bad day and losing a smartphone fight against V8. But guys, this is just looking like a disaster for me, and the quick load button is mapped to “resume” for some reason. This is not something we don't see in the outer world, but the degradation is so obvious and massive, that this one starts to doubt if his own twitter profile is able to keep with the pace.

I don't have problems with the friction during the new UI introduction, project settings / regular settings separation that will never get merged - all the UX stuff that is not always pleasant, it doesn't matter much. Things like these don't really get in the way for long, you can adapt and live with them, most of us are developers, and we know that this kind of issue gets solved last (if at all). Nobody even really cares about them (except for mac users (oh wait they may be the majority here)). There is only one key factor that really has to be satisfied in software: “it works”.

Did it? Certainly. But does it? 📉📉📉.

Seriously, guys. I'd file at least four tickets just today, if i would have the time to dig around and prepare reports. Look, this is only IDEA:

- My tests take five minutes to launch, not through Gradle, through IDEA. Sometimes they do that instantly. I've tried running it with the profiler - it captured 2ms execution time, which is the real test time and an expected value. The problem lies in the preparation that IDEA does. And i have absolutely no idea what i can do on my end. It still might be a Gradle configuration issue, yet i can't tell and haven't seeing it doing so when invoked directly.
- When i try to commit, the project starts saving, but when it's saving i can't commit, so i cancel to commit, but then - when i try - the project starts saving. Exit, pray, start again.
- I literally got “sorry, i can't copy your selection to clipboard”. Can't even exit, kill $(ps | grep | awk).
- I've start rebasing through UI, i've finished rebasing. IDEA still thinks i'm in the rebase stage, while git status reports everything is done. Exit, pray, start again.
- On one machine, i can't get “enable automatic import cleanup” to be persisted. I'm not sure about other settings, i'm just too exhausted to experiment, but i wouldn't be surprised at anything. Pray, but don't exit.
- (Something not so serious and todayish) i don't remember when the import suggestion box could get java.util.List right. At one point it did, apparently just to show us that there is a promised land, and then we probably ate an apple or something.

I'm not asking here to fix these, i'll file what and when i can as regular issues. No, i'm asking myself “how it's even possible to get here?” I'm catching myself that i use the tools with the thought “ok, where did i get trapped yesterday and how do i not use the features that triggered the traps?” I literally avoid using some parts of the application to get my work running. Yet the “days since the last bumping into a trap” counter constantly resets - that is, when it actually gets to one. And these issues don't just degrade quality or deem particular features unusable. They prevent end users from actually using IDEA at all. I have to periodically use the kill command, something that should never happen.

It would be easy to blame a specific team/product, but that's not just IDEA. “Don't put anything directly in $HOME” is a monthly recurring topic, with Rider (OK-OK, dotTrace) competing against IDEA in shoving snapshots into a non-hidden folder next to `snap` and `Postman` garbage. I vote for IDEA over Rider in this fight, because at least the snapshot directory name starts with a capital letter. A production release of Rubymine was freezing on typing rescue e (catch exception equivalent), rendering it completely unusable. Is there a dogfood department, an internal RoR application to power a site like this one? IndexNotReadyException and deadlocks in simple scenarios. As my memory is leaky and the last months were mostly around IDEA, i couldn't remember many examples in other customized IDEs, but i've just created a new project, initialized git repo, used UI to fetch everything from the remote - and yes, i knew there would be trouble in the very first couple of minutes, and it would be something used daily:

I have successfully fetched origin via IDE. But i can't checkout a remote branch. I can't even create a branch. So i just go back to the terminal, and everything there is just simply normal, nothing prevents me from doing that. Once i do it, everything gets fixed in the IDE as well.

And this is probably IDEA again, i honestly don't remember

Guys. Guys. What is happening, really? I was there, i've seen JB products just working off the shelf, this was real. The plugin exceptions situation was shitty, yes, but you could stay calm and confident about everything else.

I know that the current state of technology in general is classified as “medievally cursed”. It's a cancer that gets worse every day, and primitivizes itself at such speed, that soon we would be in the place where seniors finally would have no troubles in using latest phone models. But there's no reason to go down as well, let the others spin together this international rudder of this software-/sometimes hardware-avenging battleship and just stand aside. If you want to compete with VSCode, then lunacy is probably not one of the fields you should consider, even if it constitutes the flagman feature.

This is not a rant about a service contract, customer / provider relationship, i'm not here to desperately shake any kind of formal agreement in the air and demand something, fuck that, i'm not displeased - i'm disappointed. This kind of feedback is to resonate on a completely another frequency (bear with my silly humor till the very end) and trigger a more general effect rather than a classic social media style coupon hunt. This thing here is actually Shinji, to be honest, I was projecting all of my dreams, hopes and purpose onto you. There was a specific kind of trust and certainty, but all of it is 📉📉📉 now. Toolbox is still in my autostart and won't get anywhere. But the knowledge that i will go through my day with a helping tool that will take care of the repetitive tasks and provides more relief than exhaustion?

^ yes, you are 100% right, that's called a rhetorical question.